Wave died because no one (not even developers) understood what it is or what applications could it have outside of mail.

Wave was great for project management. It was project management without the rigid structure.

I am still hoping for something like wave to do organized work.

I think there was an open-sourcing of the code behind Wave.

Yup, it's in the Apache incubator.

Or the use case centered around friends when really it seemed more suitable for a business network.

This sentence is baffling to me. Do you not know what Wave does? Really? Or do you NEED a marketing person to tell you how to use a product?

My ex-Googler friend and I (both of us developers) excitedly started using Wave together, but soon gave up. It was neat, but we couldn't think of anything we needed it for. So this isn't a matter of ignorance.

I was, however, happy to see that some of the cool parts, like simultaneous realtime editing, made their way into Google Docs.

I'm guessing he needs a product to be intuitive enough that he doesn't need a marketing person to tell him how to use it. Wave was pretty far from that.

Worked great for me as a substitute for setting up a forum. It was a lot easier to just make a wave and invite other people on google to discuss things.

That's exactly what happened with Wave for me as well, but I wonder if the same will happen to Google+? I didn't really see a use for Google Wave... it was just so awkward...